Take Heart: A Story for Modern Stepfamilies

By Chloe Shorten

These days, families come in all shapes and sizes. They move from one state to create a family in another. They combine into new homes, take holidays with blends of children and parents from different households. They invent routines and rituals to establish their own rhythms. And don’t forget the double sets of school uniforms and pyjamas under different roofs.

Welcome to the new normal of family life for many Australians.

It is a path Chloe Shorten has walked. Chloe was surprised at the lack of helpful information and unexpected tripwires for those not fitting the traditional cookie-cutter model. She was also heartened by the sensible advice she unearthed, the resilience of her children and the joy of watching her husband become a father three times over.

Chloe tells of her own quest to create a new normal. Honest, sincere and warm hearted, this is a story of the modern household and explores the idea of who qualifies as 'a family' in the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Apr 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780522871333

Book preview

Chloe Shorten is a communications specialist, Queensland girl, mother of three and an advocate for improving the lives of women, children and people with disabilities. She lives in Melbourne and is married to Bill.

For our dear children

Rupert, Georgette and Clementine

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2017

Text © Chloe Shorten, 2017

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2017

The poem ‘Children learn what they live’ on p. 147 © 1972 by Dorothy Law Nolte.

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Clare O’Loughlin

Typeset in 12/16.5pt Bembo by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Shorten, Chloe, author.

Take heart: a story for modern stepfamilies/Chloe Shorten.

9780522871326 (paperback)

9780522871333 (ebook)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Families—Australia.

Stepfamilies—Australia.

Domestic relations—Australia.

Domestic relations—Australia.

Contents

The book I wanted to read

1Mine is a modern Australian family

2A new normal

3Resilience—A pilgrim’s progress

4Don’t listen to the haters

5Recognising the turning points

6Five years on

7When Mummy is okay

8The upside (is in the research)

9I wish I’d known then what I know now

10 It takes a village to raise a family

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

The book I wanted to read

WHEN I DECIDED to remarry and bring a stepfather into my children’s lives, I needed to ‘get it right’. I owed that to my kids.

I consulted experts for high-quality advice. I asked people I knew how they did it. There was a great bookstore in Brisbane opposite my office, and I scoured its shelves for stories of ‘successful’ outcomes for stepfamilies and particularly for the children involved. There are so many stepfamilies in history, with empires and monarchies built on remarriages! Completely head over heels and about to marry again, I wanted to show myself, my family and even my former husband it would all be okay. But the books I found were either instructive ‘how to’ ones that didn’t include success stories or had titles along the lines of Help! Yikes! We Are a Stepfamily or I’m No Stepmonster that frightened me off. Later on, I would spend an entire day in a massive Barnes & Noble store in New York—arguably a mecca for self-help, how-to and relationship advice books. But, again, what I really wanted wasn’t there. Searching online bookstores wasn’t very uplifting either. Meanwhile, it struck me that the media portrayed stepfamily situations unrealistically, with evil step-parents permeating TV shows and magazine articles.

I wanted to alleviate my anxiety, to empower myself with validating tales of the diverse and wonderful families I firmly believed ours could be. I knew we weren’t alone, because in my quest I read all the research I could find. In Australia’s population of 24 million people, there are around 5.7 million families with children and 2.8 million of these include kids under eighteen. A whopping 43 per cent of the kids under thirteen have experienced living outside the typical nuclear-family structure (Baxter, 2016a).

These are children in stepfamilies, and in lone-parent families. Many of these are shared-care families, where the children might live primarily with one parent but spend time with their other parent; or may be one of the small, but growing, number of families where children spend roughly equal time with each parent after a divorce. There are same-sex-couple families, and children living with grandparents or other relatives. So, modern Australian families are a tremendous mix. As the great chronicler of family life in this country, the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), found in October 2016, more than two in five Australian children experience living in families who don’t fit the stereotype of Mum, Dad and a brother or sister.

Research shows the majority of kids do well in these environments, and for some, the change in their family life is of great benefit. While I think it’s important to acknowledge the value of growing up in stable nuclear families, it is also crucial to be positive towards, and supportive of, those who are part of what academic lingo now calls ‘complex families’. While I think that term is useful for research purposes, I just call these families ‘the new normal’.

I needed to see stepfamily life in all its permutations and not through the lens of how a nuclear family evolves. I longed for long-term studies that showed how stepfamilies who ‘do well’ did it; I wanted to soak up joyful, moving and funny stories I could use as a model, and that would reassure the children and me, and enlighten and encourage my new husband, Bill Shorten, who was then a member of the Australian parliament. I wanted stories showing that with effort and the right kind of environment, kids in these sorts of very modern families actually thrive.

It was in the absence of instructive tales about, and models of, healthy stepfamilies that I turned to the research. The complexity of some family structures, the number of households involved, and the reluctance of some to identify as being in stepfamilies or to disclose any details means that real data is hard to get. The 2013 Family Characteristics report taken from the Australian census clearly warns its stepfamily statistics have 25–50 per cent unreliability for these reasons. So, the bulk of the long-term literature on stepfamilies is largely authored overseas, the accounts are often based on deficits and pathologies, and the figures are easy to misinterpret. As a career researcher and a big believer in evidence-based decision-making, I was gobsmacked. How can we, as a society, possibly be making good decisions, and creating good policies, services and support systems, for a huge and growing number of Australian families?

Relief came when I discovered new research that academics, clinicians and practitioners from the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK have painstakingly undertaken. I have now read hundreds of academic papers, articles, books, speeches and editorials, and spoken to experts everywhere. Happily, in all this I found the most extensive examination of Australian stepfamilies ever undertaken. Growing Up In Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children looks at 8000 children from all states and territories whose lives researchers have focused on for more than a decade.

Also, demographer and senior research fellow Dr Jennifer Baxter’s work for the AIFS is based on the longest-term analysis of the largest number of Australian families ever undertaken. Her report Diversity, Complexity and Change in Children’s Households was released just as I started writing this book, with the AIFS saying, ‘The [Baxter] study showed that a significant number of children live in more complex households, with the potential for this to impact both positively and negatively.’

All this has convinced me even more that not just interested parents like me but the whole community need to talk more about valuing families in all their wonderful complexity. As society changes, so do families, and we need to agree that different sizes and types of families are okay (and inevitable). We need broad understanding that the health of these microsystems is vital to our national wellbeing. That it’s what we do within those families, how we learn from the lessons of the past and the researchers’ toil that matters. That if we understand the imperative of consistent care, and a broad support network for children and parents, a warm, strong parenting method, and a community that doesn’t judge and a system that supports them, then the kids will be all right.

I’d love to see all families have a greater share of the bandwidth in our public conversation.

The book I was searching for wasn’t there and so this is why I decided to tell my story. But it’s also the story of all those families who opened their hearts to me, and of the marvellous professionals who have unlocked the insights that modern Australian families need.

1

Mine is a modern Australian family

AS A GIRL, I had very fixed notions of my future. I would grow up, go to university, fall in love and get married, work and have children who would be like me. On the bus or in my bedroom, I named all the members of my family, including my husband. I would keep living in Brisbane, close to my family, and know just what to do as a spouse and parent.

In my ideal family, we would embrace all the traditions I grew up with, the milestones of life: celebrating birthdays, christenings, marriages and funerals, Christmas, Easter and family holidays. We’d watch movies together. My husband and I would watch from the sidelines at sports matches, and closely supervise homework, like my parents did with me and my siblings, Jack, Revy, Rupert and Tom. Education and being part of the community would be important, as would be sharing with my children a love of books and the arts, as my parents shared this with me.

I was very, very lucky that I had parents who were happy with, and lovely to, each other. They are very grounded people, and their marriage has lots of jokes and lots of warmth. They have been married fifty-four years, and many of their closest friends are celebrating similar grand anniversaries. All the families I grew up around were rather traditional, with lots of kids, which meant plenty of noise and activity. One of the things that worked for Mum and Dad was that they are good at problem solving: it’s not that they didn’t go through difficult times, but they navigated adversity together.

While I was growing up, my father had an architecture and design practice where, for over four decades, he employed hundreds of professionals of all ages, many of whom were parents. My brothers and sister and I spent quite a bit of time playing under his drafting table and it certainly was an early example of a flexible workplace. His practice eventually merged with an international firm, and this took him all over the world, advising on the built environment and corporate identity. Mum worked part time until we were in our teens, lecturing in law. At high school, I was one of the odd ones out in having a mother who worked full time.

So, I expected to replicate with my own family a childhood that was happy and pretty conventional, except that for my parents gender-based roles were less rigid because they had demanding careers. Dad was very much ahead of his time—he did a lot more of the hands-on parenting, the cooking, driving kids around and shopping, than did many men of his era.

I expected that my marriage would be a fairly equal partnership; that I would work and have my own life but still be a partner in a very solid unit. I had quite ‘modern’ views but also the traditional goal of having a close family like the one I grew up with.

And this is what I did. I met my first husband when I was twenty-one, at a friend’s party, and married him at twenty-seven, though I had my first child later than I expected to, at twenty-nine. My first husband and I were together for sixteen years, until I was thirty-seven. My marriage ending was not easy for me. I felt like I had failed. It was very painful for all of us, my children, family, friends and their dad. It was not like celebrity divorces that make it look emotional but fairly simple. I don’t think they are ever like that. By then, we had two children, aged six and seven, and they experienced the stages of grief as though a family member had died. Because, really, part of the family had.

My first husband is a talented architect, like my father. He had been married previously to a successful woman and had the view that women could do anything men could do. Still, it was tricky when I was trying to juggle my career in corporate communications, his ambitions, and two children under eighteen months. We worked hard to prevent the breakdown of our marriage, and it took a long time for our relationship to unwind. I suspect when we entered counselling, we did so a little too late.

It would have helped to know then what I know now: that, contrary to what I grew up with, long marriages are not a given. Marriage has been evolving throughout human history. In, for example, Old-Testament times, life expectancy was less than fifty, and marriage was largely for economic reasons and certainly not based on love—which is why Jesus’ teaching about loving your wife or husband-to-be was quite radical. But modern life expectancy and its consequently elongated marriages have not really changed the idea of what a ‘normal’ family is.

There are many people living in healthy and strong family units who feel some groups in society see them as ‘other’. For them to be regarded as ‘other’ simply doesn’t reflect reality, or acknowledge that the idea of family is nothing if not dynamic.

In a similar time span to that of my first marriage, for instance, the number of people in the US who were married trended down from 70 per cent to just under 50 per cent. Currently, a third of Australian families are stepfamilies, and many more are sole-parent families, or shared-care families where there are two separated ‘sole’ parents, and the children spend time with each. The latest available data tells us that 72 per cent of Australian families with a child under eighteen are ‘intact’, or original-marriage, families. So, 28 per cent of families are those in which parents have separated or divorced, or in which children live with a sole parent from the start, or with same-sex parents, or with parents in a subsequent long-term relationship, either or both of whom have children from previous relationships.

Even the 2013 National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) report Modern Family stated: ‘Marriages were once the cornerstone of Australian families but over the past few decades Australian families have undergone significant change’. Yet, we’re still hooked on marriage as the key way to define what a family is.

Before I learned about the huge variety and vibrancy of ‘different’, or non-nuclear, families in Australia, I felt like I lost part of my identity when my first marriage ended. I had a definite sense of failure that prompted a period of looking really hard at myself and the world around me. I saw divorce as the end of my family unit, and felt it keenly, especially because of the children. I think divorce is still regarded differently if there are children involved. I was certainly aware of this, in part because mine played out in the public eye but also because I was the first of my generation in the family to get divorced. When I looked into the family records, though, there was a great-great-grandfather, a cousin, and an aunt or two who had got divorced, just as there would be in most family histories.

Across all societies and cultures, family is still considered to be at the heart of society, the building block, a fundamental and universal element of all communities, despite the culture war over what ‘true’ family is. In Australia, we are experiencing a social revolution in types of families, but there needs to be more discussion about, and recognition of, this. It is a revolution among those who have formed families through circumstances, kinship and moral responsibility, not just through biology. Why aren’t we being the supportive and encouraging community they need?

But, no matter what a family looks like, the work of parenting is still the same; it is the effort involved in providing a safe and happy home for children raised, with love and care, to maturity. It is in our collective interest for Australia’s neighbourhoods to recognise, understand, encourage and support the wellbeing of all families. We need to tell and hear these households’ stories without stigma or judgment.

I was surprised to learn that if you have kids, society looks at you differently once you are no longer married. This made me more self-conscious. For example, before I was divorced, I was a professional woman with children and did not see that as anything unusual, but after my first husband and I separated, I became more self-conscious about being